Lifestyle Open Information Day

By Anonymous · May 19, 2005

Saturday the 23rd of April - Lifestyle, my favorite piercing shop, was having its open information day. A bunch of iam-ers were going to be there, so I decided to go too. I met most of them before at the first Truth Seekers Syndicate Event that I attended, but there were also a few people I didn't meet yet in real life. The open information day meant discounts on jewelry, live psy-goa-trance music by DJ Alphar, drinks and candy, and of course: modifications!

At 2 pm Ego Kornus was going to do a ritual performance, Rule would be traditionally tattooing starting at around 3 pm, Sandra would do some brandings at 4 pm, and at 6 pm there would be a suspension. However, Rule had im-ed me the night before to ask if I couldn't do "something" because the guy who was supposed to do the suspension had canceled. I ended up doing a pull, together with Bart, but more on that later.

I arrived at Lifestyle at around 1.30 pm, and found Kor and Brigitte outside the store. I chatted with them for a bit before going inside. It wasn't very busy yet, and there were no other fellow iam-ers yet. I talked with Rule for a while and we decided that I was going to do a pull against Bart. The space behind the counter was prepared for Kor's ritual, with a trunk on the floor were he would sit on, a metal halo with many holes that would be hanging above his head to guide the spears through, and red tube-lights hanging down from the ceiling. Some iam-ers arrived and I hung out with them. man0whore brought a friend who wanted two surface piercings underneath her navel, and I volunteered to take pictures of the procedure.

Jimmy took all of us to one of the piercing rooms, and went to get the needles, clamps and barbells. He bent the barbells into surface bars on the spot, and then the marking process could start. She wanted them to be in a square so the marking had to be absolutely perfect. Both me and Man0whore where asked to judge whether it was all straight and we had Jimmy adjust the marks several times before we ok-ed the placement. Time to get into the chair, she was a little nervous as these were her first "real" piercings. But the piercing process itself looked like it was a breeze, she took it very well and the result looks amazing.

When that was done Kor was about to start his performance. He had a 0 ga cheek spear (pierced at 8 ga and stretched to 0 ga immediately) with some weight dangling down from it, and two spears were pierced through his eyebrows. He was naked except for some shorts and sat down on the trunk. Sitting down wasn't that easy: the spears through his eyebrows had to be guided through the halo from below, so he had to duck very deep and then slowly get up a little again before he could sit down. When he had found a kind of comfortable position, Rule started adding spears, putting them through the metal halo and pressing the spears deep into Kor's skull. Kor sat there, silently, trying not to move too much. It was very impressive to see him sitting there, with like 30 spears pressing into his head. Stones were put around his trunk, and as a finishing touch glass fragments were spread in between the stones. Kor spent about 3 hours sitting there.

While Kor was doing his performance, Rule did traditional tattooing (hand-poked) in one of the rooms, and Sandra did brandings in another room. I checked out both procedures or talked to people the next few hours. Rule was tattooing crop-circles on a guy's thigh. Hand-poked tattooing is a pretty slow process, and one little poke is not painful, but a thousand all together are. I watched it for a while, but it is kind of boring to watch, so I went to the other room where Sandra was doing brandings. First, did a star on the shoulder blade of a girl. It was already branded a few months earlier, but she went over it again to make the scar even more visible and raised I guess. Sandra heated a straight and relatively thick piece of metal in a gas torch until it was red hot and pressed this on the girl's skin, doing two strikes (which formed one line of the star) every time before reheating the metal. It looked painful and you could smell the burning flesh.

After this star was done, Sandra branded another star on the side of a guy's neck, which seemed even more painful  the skin seems so thin and vulnerable there. This was also a scar that had been done previously and Sandra went over it again. The lines of this star were thinner and it was done with a cautery pen (which took a while to get working because there was some loose contact inside and we had to tape the button down to the pen). It made a sizzling sound and the smell was there too, though less strong as with the branding on the shoulder blade.

After the brandings, it was time to remove Kor's spears, which Rule did. Kor had been sitting there for about 3 hours and had enough. Carefully, Rule pulled out the spears from Kor's head and the metal halo one by one, except for the two spears going through Kor's eyebrows. Kor slowly moved down so that the spears would come out underneath the halo, which was just as difficult as getting them in there while having them in your eyebrows. In the back the spears and his cheek spear were removed by Rule, and I was told (I didn't witness that part) especially his eyebrows bled quite a bit.

After that, it was time for the pull, so Bart and I went to the back and got our hooks. We had a lot of fun with our pulling, you can find the detailed story right here. After the pull I socialized for a bit, before I had to leave to the venue where I had a gig with my band. Around that time, most people had left anyway. It was an awesome afternoon with many beautiful modifications and rituals and good vibes all over!

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